Obama, Coburn: Odd Bedfellows in the Hunt for Bipartisanship

By Gerald F. Seib
A couple of times in recent weeks, the personal cellphone of Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma rang, and a baritone voice on the other end asked simply, “You know who this is?”

Mr. Coburn did indeed know by the sound of the voice. The caller was President-to-be Barack Obama, dialing up to chat about what the senator calls “spiritual things,” and then some policy issues facing the new administration.

The exchanges might seem unremarkable, except for the extreme odd-bedfellow nature of the Democratic president and the Republican senator he was calling. Mr. Coburn is among the most conservative lawmakers in town, having won three straight 100% annual ratings from the American Conservative Union for his votes in the Senate. Mr. Obama, by contrast, got an 8% lifetime rating from the conservative group for his Senate voting record.

Yet the new president has identified the Oklahoma Republican as a conservative he can work with, which says much about the president’s style and strategy. The relationship also illustrates some of the limits of Mr. Obama’s oft-professed desire to find common ground with political opponents.

Mr. Obama proclaimed often in his campaign, and then again in his transition and inaugural address, his intention to be a post-partisan leader, transcending the partisan divides and squabbles that have marked Washington in the past decade or two. What that means, in practical terms, is that he must find Republicans with whom he can work on a reasonably regular basis.

The problem is that the ranks of the Republicans most likely to find common ground with a Democratic president — that is to say, moderate Republicans — have been decimated in recent years. They have retired, lost their seats to Democrats or been supplanted by more-conservative Republicans. At this point, the senators who fit the traditional description of “moderate Republican” could meet in a phone booth.

Gone are such relative moderates as William Roth of Delaware, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, Gordon Smith of Oregon and Pete Domenici of New Mexico. Also gone are generally conservative members who crossed lines to work with Democrats on specific issues, such as Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. The Senate’s most prominent remaining Republican moderates are Maine’s Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.

Similarly, in the House, there isn’t a single Republican left in the delegations of the six New England states, the traditional wellspring of moderate Republicans. The last such Republican departed when Connecticut moderate Christopher Shays lost his seat in November.

The upshot: If Mr. Obama wants to work with Republicans, he’s going to have to find genuine conservatives with whom he can make common cause from time to time, despite ideological divides.

As a former senator himself, the president has ties he can use. He has a good relationship, for example, with Robert Bennett of Utah and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, both fiscal conservatives with reputations for fostering good ties with Democratic colleagues. Mr. Gregg already has been helpful to the new president, speaking out in favor of, and then voting for, releasing unspent money from the financial-system bailout fund so it could be used by the Obama administration.

And there is Mr. Coburn. “We consider each other friends,” he says in an interview. “Not friends like everybody in the Senate says, but real friends.”

Mr. Coburn is a blunt-speaking, unapologetically conservative Oklahoma family physician who was a member of the 1994 class of House Republicans that stormed to power behind Newt Gingrich to take over that chamber. He retired from the House in 2001, then returned to Congress by winning a Senate seat in 2004 — the same year one Barack Obama was elected from Illinois.

The two found common cause by uniting to push through a bill designed to stem the spread of earmarks, those legislative provisions that funnel money to lawmakers’ specific pet projects. Their bill aimed to reduce the use of earmarks by casting a harsher spotlight on them, creating a public, searchable online database listing the recipients of all federal spending.

A tie was formed, and Mr. Obama kept it alive by reaching out to Mr. Coburn during the transition. “We have a little talk about spiritual things, and then we’ll talk about other things, things he wants to talk about,” including the use of those financial-market rescue funds, Mr. Coburn says. Ironically, it’s the kind of outreach the senator says he never got from the just-departed president of his own party, George W. Bush.

“Barack is a smart, smart operator,” Mr. Coburn says. “He’s going to be loath to make enemies.”
Mr. Coburn thinks the new president will be able, in particular, to work with him and other conservatives on measures to make government more transparent and to eliminate programs.

Yet Mr. Coburn, despite his fondness for the new president, also voices deep doubts about the giant economic-stimulus package the administration is pushing. The initial version floated in the House has, in his view, too much wasted spending that won’t stimulate the economy and too few permanent tax cuts.

“I’m not sure the stimulus is going to do anything,” he says. “I think I’ll be happy to vote against it if there’s $700 billion in wasted spending.” Thus does the Obama-Coburn relationship define both the possibilities, and the limits, of the new era of outreach.

Just , take a look about who is the one at helm in the CIA, …what is happening to Guantanamo,… why Holder ( a terrorist advocate) is in the cabinet,…on top of that ,Geithner ( tax avoided ) as head of the US Treasure !,….you know things like that.

IT LOOKS LIKE A SYSTEMATIC PLAN TO SERVE OUR COUNTRY IN SILVER PLATE ,TO OUR ENEMIES.

Oh, you must be REAL BLIND TO REALITY TO LET ALL THIS PASS YOU!

Ok, end of story. Is your brain functioning now? Perhaps is a good line for a movie, or not….who knows?

10:12 am January 23, 2009

Sum Dood wrote :

I wonder if Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi understand what is about to happen to them.

About Capital Journal

Capital Journal is WSJ.com’s unique site for analysis of the political and policy maneuvering in Washington in the era of Barack Obama. It features the Capital Journal columns and occasional other postings by executive Washington editor Gerald F. Seib, and will house Political Wisdom, the Journal’s daily aggregation of the smartest political analysis from around the Internet. Also look for regular columns by Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute and occasional contributions from others.